A Reflection on Perfection

 We are imperfect beings, trapped within a culture that seems to only find perfection in its icons and institutions. There I’ve said it, not so eloquently, not very colorfully but I said it. I am not perfect.

       If I was perfect I’d be able to say it better.

       I know that the world -- the world we have created, the world of myth and legend of man at his best, striving and driving toward his goal of perfection, as expressed in our art, in our media, in our dreams, in our religious institutions is nothing but a serious fetish for Fairy Tales.

           Sorry Martha Stuart, but let’s all take a deep breath, let it out and take a step back from our creation and see it for what it is: denial and delusion.

           1.Standards and Practices. In any form, in any era, they come and go, ebb and flow and simply change with the times. So why do we adhere to them so? Well, I guess order and conventionality have to start somewhere. The basic needs of society: to offer comfort and comradeship, not to hurt oneself or others, to nurture and protect our young are all positive benefits to everyone. To arbitrarily raise rents, hike utility bills, pass legislation for revenge and to generally impose your will on the behavior of others is wrong – to simply accept such abuses in our lives, without question, by rote, by inertia as adherence to the over-seers of perfection, is a sin. Do yourself a favor: question a few standards and practices once in a while.

           2.Continuity. Whether it’s in movie- making or making your moves in the world, we seem to strive for continuity as the religion of routine and repetition. "That is how it is always done!" The clerk at Motor Vehicles will say that to you. The Rajahs of regulation --such as the teacher who tsk, tsks at your child’s coloring outside the lines -- are afraid the chain of command and conformist thought just might be challenged and, heaven forbid broken if the aberrant influence has its say and questions the policy.

           3.All Measurement is Agreement. If enough people agree on something, the boundaries are drawn. I learned this from Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now: “There’s no such thing as a fraction, what are you gonna do fly out into space and land on a fraction?” the wisest words I ever heard. Why have we become obsessed with and slaves to measurement? I guess we had to create something knowable, quantitative and valuable in a Universe that never asked to be measured in the first place.

           4.Aesthetically Speaking. How did we let beauty get out of hand? The even featured, the unblemished, the non-threatening are not found in nature, only in the illusory nature of man.

           5. Our thoughts travel faster and cheaper. Thought is having less and less value in a society obsessed with the perfection of tangible results and empirical validation. Here’s an example: Our so called finest minds were, a few short years ago, thumping the tables and whooping it up that they “discovered” the Basalt rocks on Mars were like the Basalt rocks in the dry river beds of New Mexico. Duh? If these brains really thought about it, they were spending billions to touch and poke rocks on Mars, the same rocks they could have touched and poked here on earth with a stick in New Mexico. THINK!

           6. God is not Perfect.. He’s (or She’s) probably taken a few naps now and then, had a memory lapse or two like your favorite aunt or uncle, and God has been swamped with requests and tad overwhelmed – see, he or she is certainly not perfect. No matter how many men and women in the religious right preach so or how much Hollywood or our artists wish to portray him or Jesus, or Buddha as a combination Charleston Heston and Keanue Reeves. God is probably a rococo, rolly-poly impish and ironic jester, tempting and taunting you to be not a perfect person but a better person.

           Nothing rankles my bones more than when I hear one of my fragile and frail fellow human beings claim that they are Perfectionists. The striving to be heard, validated and understood only under the auspices of perfection is absurd and self-defeating. Perfectionism is simply fear, the shying away from a challenge. Perfection is the control freak’s passion for sublimation and stereotypes and the comfort of redundancy, rules and regulations… Rules that say I should have placed this paragraph at the beginning instead of the end, this essay would have made more sense…to a perfectionist.

copyright 2010 Joe Dinki